


Every Song Has a ‘You’ (Oh Darling I Know What You’re Going Through)

by detritius



Category: Lost
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Drug Use, F/M, Hallucinations, Jealousy, Sexual Content, violent imagery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-05
Updated: 2015-06-05
Packaged: 2018-04-03 01:14:46
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,468
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4080886
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/detritius/pseuds/detritius
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>AU after "Through the Looking Glass." For Jack and Kate, life off the island isn’t quite what they hoped for.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Every Song Has a ‘You’ (Oh Darling I Know What You’re Going Through)

**Author's Note:**

> My first ever Lost fic, written circa November 2009. I started this after watching the season three finale, and it's pretty much AU from there, although there may be some season four relevant details mixed in. I binge-watched all of Lost in a couple of months, so it's hard to know exactly what I knew and when I knew it.

The sheets shore up around him, but the room doesn’t spin. It just tilts a little in the corner, by the door, drawing his eyes down along the angle. Waiting. His fingers tap silent against his stomach, and he licks his lips again, so dry that they stick together. He hasn’t had a drink all day, and he tells himself that doesn’t matter. He doesn’t do it because he has to; he does it because he can. Because there’s an unlimited supply of everything here, and he doesn’t have to sleep with one eye open in case something happens during the night and the racing lights of traffic and all the human noise make it damn hard to get to sleep if he doesn’t. But it’s not about any of that right now, and there’s a mini-bar somewhere to his right that he’s not even thinking about. It doesn’t even cross his mind that he could get up right now and open one of the little bottles, same as they had on the island. Nor does he consider that he might be doing this for her, so she doesn’t taste it on his breath, because he’s not doing anything, because abstaining isn’t an action and he doesn’t need a reason to not drink. He’s certainly not doing it because he suspects it would remind her of someone else.

As if the smell of booze on his breath would matter, as if it could even compare to the unspoken presence between them, the throbbing, aching hole of his lack. Jack can almost feel him. He can feel his gaze boring into his back. Somewhere over his right shoulder, where Jack refuses to look, he’s sprawled in one of the hard, identical hotel chairs, one of his bare, dirty feet tapping against the floor, waiting too. Jack can see him in pieces; his big hands on the armrests, tanned and calloused and clumsy in stillness, his frayed jeans and faded, sweat-stained shirt, his overlong, windblown hair, his changeable eyes, staring, soft grey in the dim light. But he can’t make out his expression, can’t make the pieces fit together, and it feels desperately like something’s missing. He wants to turn and look and reassure himself, but he doesn’t know what would be worse: seeing him or finding him gone again, still. He doesn’t know what he would say to him.

He takes a breath and tries to relax, tries not to hear the drawled-out accusations that are just in his head. He does feel a little better, lighter, the hard edges of the world softening to a bearable level. The pills dissolving in his stomach must be starting to work on him, taking away pain that’s not from an injury, but from everything. The exactness and finite banality of the world, the impossible faces that accost him from out of a crowd. He sees them everywhere: Sun and Jin walking hand in hand down the sidewalk, Charlie playing his guitar on a street corner, Juliet standing in front of him in line at the store, Locke sitting on a park bench in the rain, Boone dying in the next OR. He knows what he’s seeing can’t be real, and as soon as he looks away, they vanish. But still, they haunt him. They call him back. Hard to believe he could miss the head-spinning confusion and doubt of his former life. But he does.

He has to talk to Kate. His eyes fasten onto the door, and the seconds stretch out endlessly. He has to know if it’s the same for her, if this is epidemic for them. He’s so afraid that he’s the only one, that he’s the one who can’t let go. Maybe Kate’s so good at running and lying that she left them all behind the second she set foot on land again. She isn’t carrying them like he is. They don’t call to her from the silence. And when she’s alone, she’s really alone; she doesn’t have the feeling of someone watching her with battered, knowing eyes, and the pale echo of his voice, his sardonic, accusing words, rattling around inside her head. Deep down, Jack knows this, and he knows she didn’t ask him here to talk. But he can’t turn away from her, even if she’s already turned her back on all of them, because for him, she’s all that’s left. He can’t leave her.

_She’s not comin’_ , says the voice from the up-tilt of the room, echoing in the silence or in Jack’s head. _She’s gone. She left you behind, doc, just like the rest of us._ Jack tries not to react at all, doesn’t look in his direction, doesn’t answer out loud. He knows it’ll just encourage him, and he knows he’s going crazy because there’s no one else here. He needs to not be alone, because he’s never really alone. He needs a real, living person to fill the vacuous space, to chase away the shadows, the voices. But he’s been waiting here so long it could have been days, and maybe he’s right this time and maybe she’s not coming. His hands shake until he clenches them together, and he closes his eyes and repeats the lie under his breath. “Only eight of us survived the crash,” he says. The words rasp in the back of his throat, brittle as dead leaves, gritty as sand, and he barely hears them on his own lips. But it doesn’t matter. He’ll hear, would hear even if the words were only in Jack’s head. “Only eight of us survived the crash, and only six of us got rescued. You got your gut sliced open when the plane crashed, and you bled out in the water. You never even made it to shore. You’re dead.” He closes his eyes, repeats it like a prayer. “You’re dead.”

In the corner, weary eyes crease closed in pain and one hand splays out over his stomach, blood blossoming through his shirt, painting his fingers. It runs down his wrist and drips off him, fat red drops on the thin hotel carpet. Jack sees it all so clearly without turning to look, smells the blood and the salt water, but it can’t be real, and he won’t look. If he doesn’t look, then the chair is empty, and the carpet isn’t stained, and somewhere, he isn’t bleeding. But here, now, he pulls up his shirt and looks at himself, at the twisted, gory hole where a handful organs should be. _Guess there was nothing you could do_ , he muses. Then he looks up, straight at Jack, with blood running unhurried down his thighs, and the slightest tinge of it on his lips, spilling out of his mouth. _You wish this’d happened, don’t you?_ He laughs humorlessly, and a little more blood splatters his face. _So do I_. And before Jack can say no, that’s not what he wants, that the lie is just a lie and he’s trying to protect them, the door opens.

Jack feels like he’s been shaken out of a dream. He blinks and looks up, and Kate’s standing over him in new, clean clothes and earrings dangling down, with her hair all done and a single, mascaraed tear trail on her left cheek. “You’re here,” she whispers.

“Yeah…” he says. The word drags itself out laboriously, as he remembers how to speak. He props himself on one arm to look at her, and as he moves, the floor rocks like the deck of a ship. In the corner, hands grip tight to armrests, knuckles stretching bone-white though the skin, face gone bloodless with the memory of turbulence. Kate doesn’t seem to feel a thing. She stands in front of him, composed except the one black remnant of a tear that he can’t quite bring himself to doubt.

“I didn’t know if…” She shakes her head. “It’s just been so long. I didn’t know if you would come.”

Jack doesn’t know how long it’s been, doesn’t so much observe the passage of time anymore. “I’m here,” he says, and it’s obvious and less than he means. There should be an always, but he can’t say it. He doesn’t want to break another promise.

Kate sits down on the other side of the bed, looks down at the worn coverlet. “I almost turned back, you know,” she says, and there’s something thick and desperate about her voice. “I was so afraid you wouldn’t be here.” She sniffles, and her eyes dart in his direction before lowering again. Her hands twist in her lap. “After what I said to you… I thought you’d never want to see me again.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Jack says. Whatever it was. If it had been so bad, he thinks he would remember it. “So… why’d you want to see me, Kate?”

She sighs. “I just missed you. I mean, I’ve only known you for a couple of months, but, what happened to us… what we went though… it brought us together.” And it’s perverse, and it goes against every antagonistic thought he had before, but when she says ‘us’, Jack desperately hopes she doesn’t just mean the two of them.

“I missed you, too,” he says, and that’s not what he means, either. But he doesn’t know if he means ‘I love you,’ or ‘I wish we could go back to the way things were.’ Maybe there isn’t even a difference.

Kate crosses some of the space between them and shrugs out of her jacket, revealing arms gone pale from lack of sunlight. “I’ve been thinking about you,” she says, and leans in closer still. She stares at him with her green, dark-lined eyes, her clean, made-up, distant face, and the silence becomes so loud, so present, that it’s almost as if there’s a body lying between them, brushing them with its cold, tight skin, its glassy eyes staring into Jack’s face, too. He should say something, but everything is wrong. He can’t tell her he’d wondered if she was going crazy. He can’t tell her he’s already long gone. So he pushes the body away until it crumples to the floor and vanishes, and he leans in and takes her face between his hands, and he closes his eyes. He feels her breath against his face, then the gentle pressure of her lips, but in the dark behind his eyes, he sees the figure in the corner get up and turn his back, faced towards the window with his head in his hands. He’s clean of blood again, except for one small, spreading stain, off-center between his shoulder blades. But then Jack blinks, and the image is gone, and there’s just Kate in front of him, kissing him with her eyes open. Her lips move against his, curving up and then opening. He responds to her, lets her in, and he wraps an arm around her shoulders. Her skin feels too cold in the machine-cooled air, and it makes him almost want to pull away. But he doesn’t; this isn’t her fault.

Jack pulls her closer to him, into the circle of his arms, trying to warm her with his skin. He feels feverish himself, and he kisses her until he’s feeling a little lightheaded. He slumps down onto the bed, meaning to tell her that he’s not feeling so great and maybe they should stop, but before he can she’s on top of him, straddling his chest and kissing his face and neck sloppily, greedily, and he thinks he’s probably okay after all. He puts his hands on her shoulders, guides her down, and she sucks his lower lip, runs her tongue around it, against the roughness of his unshaven face and into his mouth again. Her hands don’t seem to know where to rest: stroking his face, running down his body, pulling his shirt up, toying with the fastenings on his pants. She tries to run one hand though his hair, grabs at it futility, but it’s too short. Jack tells himself that maybe it’s just something she does, but he can’t help thinking that, for a second, she saw something else. And he tells himself fervently that he only sees her. But it’s getting dark somewhere in his head, and before his eyes, Kate’s form starts to blur, shadowy, until she could be anyone. Jack tries hard to focus, to make himself see her. She comes back to him, but the room fades out to nothing, the light dimming, the sound deadening, until all that’s left is the two of them. She glows in his perception, harsh in the boiling void and the nausea grows in him until he has to close his eyes. Even then, he’s still intensely aware of her, the thunder of her heartbeat, the gale force of her breath, and he shakes and sweats and moans. Weak, still, he reaches out to her. She’s all that’s left in this destruction, and he needs someone to hold on to.

At the same moment, he feels her pulling away from him. She moves down his body like a line of fire, and he reaches out blindly, catching her hip. She touches his hand, and she says something, but the words get lost. There’s a ringing in his ears, or a roaring, like the tide, and without her close to anchor him, he feels spun around, disoriented. The cold breathes against his skin, and he shivers. Then she’s laying over him again, and the weight of her body is a sweet relief, bringing him back down to earth, the warmth of her skin reviving him. He opens his eyes and he can see again: her face, the black tear smudged now, her gentle smile, her hair, coming undone now and falling around her face, her bare shoulders, silvered in the moonlight. “Hey,” she whispers. “You okay?”

“Yeah,” he says. He’s fine. He’s languid, heavy, disinclined to move much, but he’s also light and free and easy. The pain’s gone, to the point where he almost can’t remember what it was, and it’s like he’s floating, but not going anywhere. They’re here, and they’re together, the moon full above them, and all the stars, and the glint and the sound of the waves in the distance. And there’s something very strange about all of this, and wrong, he’s sure, but for now, he doesn’t question. He just wants to drift, and loop his leaden arms around Kate’s back, and kiss her. “I love you,” he murmurs, when she pulls away.

He doesn’t hear what she says in return as she settles back, opening his shirt the rest of the way, but it doesn’t bother him. It could only have been one thing, after all, and he’s not afraid anymore. She leans in over him, kissing his neck and his chest. Then she looks at him and rests one hand against the sharp rise in his pants he hadn’t noticed until now. It had just been part of everything - the heat, the ache that has nothing to do with pain, the sickening, headlong rush. Only now does he realize how much he wants - needs - this. Kate strokes him once and he gasps, electrified. “You ready?” she asks.

“Hell yeah,” he says, and she smiles. She lays herself over him and kisses him one last time, holding his face and diving into him, their bodies pressed together. Then she sits up and wriggles out of her own jeans and her underwear. She kneels, next to him, just in her lacy black bra, and looks at him while he looks at her. He breaks away first, a little embarrassed, and he feels her unzip his fly. He glances up a second to see her pull his pants and boxers down to his knees, and then she touches him and hot, dizzying, agonizing pleasure hits him like a wall. It comes on so fast, like a physical force, that his head reels back and his eyes snap shut and it takes everything in him not to pass out or come right there. He can’t help the sound he makes, the almost-panicked moan, and then it’s over, and he wants to pull it back into him. The sensation leeches out of him, numbing him all over, left dazed and breathless by just one touch, and Kate’s staring down at him with her doubt clear in her eyes. She thinks there’s something wrong with him, and there is, more than he can express. But he thinks she’ll overlook that in favor of how helpless, how _pitiful_ , how _needy_ Jack is. _This isn’t what she expected, isn’t what she wanted, and the doubt, the regret…_ But the words in his head are straying out of his own voice, and he needs to make it stop. He starts talking just to block it out, grabs Kate’s wrist and pleads with her. “It’s all right,” he hears himself saying, “It’s all right. Don’t go. Don’t stop.”

“I… I thought I hurt you,” she says. She picks up one of his dead-metal hands and holds it. “You don’t have to do this for me, you know,” she says. “we could just-”

“No,” Jack says. “I want to do this. I need this, Kate. I need you.” 

“Okay,” she says. Seconds pass and waves eat inevitably at the shore as he waits for her to say something else. But she doesn’t. She just looks down for long moments, her hair hiding her face, and then she climbs over his legs and sits astride him, slowly easing herself down over him.

At first he doesn’t feel anything at all. Then, sensation bleeds into him again, and it feel hot and tight and good, and, like most of the sex he’s ever had, cheap and anonymous. She’s riding him with her eyes closed and her lips open in a silent little gasp, and he tells himself again that he loves her. But that doesn’t matter. That makes it worse. Sooner or later, even the women he loves can’t look at him.

He twitches his hips up into her, too weakly, and failing to get a reaction, slings one heavy arm over his face, blocking everything out. Eyes closed, he imagines her as anyone and everyone else, imagines her with her eyes open. In his head, in the dim light, her eyes are gray. Then she wraps a hand around him, gripping him tight, and the world flashes white behind his eyelids, and he comes like sobbing.

Sitting on the beach in the sunlight, watching the waves, he can feel her next to him. He glances at her, sees her staring out, simple in her plane-crash clothes, a little dirty and beautiful. “Three days ago, we all died,” he says. “We all deserve the chance to start over.” And it’s all a just a joke. She stares back out at the water, and he takes his head in his hands, and he feels himself start to unravel.

When he comes back around, Kate’s cleaned up and pulling her pants on. He hauls himself up on his arms, and she doesn’t turn back to see him. “Kate,” he says. His voice gets caught, but he strains it, drags it out. “What are we doing here?”

Finally, she looks at him. “I…” she starts. Another tear runs down her face, black as the first one. “I’m seeing someone,” she says. “But I kept thinking about you and…” She shakes her head. “I had to let go. I’m so sorry, Jack.”

She waits for him to say something, but he doesn’t. He drags himself to his feet, weighed down with every step, and goes to the window, stares out unseeing at the dark skyline. He hears the door close behind her, and he doesn’t chase after her, doesn’t say all the things he meant to say. She walks out of his life, and he grabs a tiny, godawfully expensive Scotch from the minibar and throws himself on the bed. He drinks half of it at a go and it burns his throat and swells in his chest like warm heartache. He closes his eyes, lets a tear spill out, and he gets that not-alone feeling again. When he looks, he’s not surprised to see Sawyer reclined on the bed next to him, a Dharma beer in one hand, propped against his stomach. There’s still blood on him, soaked and dried into his shirt over his left pectoral, but the wound must be closed now. He smiles, not showing his dimples or his teeth, his sea-gray eyes unchanging. “Here’s to the one who got away,” he says, and drinks. Jack drinks, too, and the world starts to slide, and he waits and wishes for oblivion.

**Author's Note:**

> Title is from "Dilate" by Ani DiFranco and "Headfirst Slide Into Cooperstown On a Bad Bet" by Fall Out Boy. I'm not sure why I thought smacking lyrics from two different songs together was a good idea, I was just out of high school when I wrote this.


End file.
